Courier 10pt typeface on A4 letter, or 80x25 displays marginspace etc all common concepts all need hard line wrapping with contextual wrapping and layout in plaintext, as well as few MUA actually soft wrap for display but instead hard wrapping, let alone many webmail mangle beyond 70, many even shorter. Best is to apply the roughly 70 char email etiquette, which happens to allow at least a few levels of quoted replies by MUAs which in all likelihood will be hard wrapping single received lines anyways. Single lines in text editors are major pain, and the netiquette requires multiline reply editing anyways. Humans read parse and edit in line oriented book form anyways too. These old written and unwritten standards exist for reasons. If stupid lazy noobs want to invent a new charstream format, go spec it out. Else go read a nice multiline book. See also fmt(1) and neomutt options.

On 29.01.2018 09:44, list member "I" wrote:

Who set the etiquette?

That would be the mailing list owner(s). E-mail netiquette, in various forms, has been around since at least the late 80s. A good portion of it can be found in RFC1855 (released 1995), or in texts like "Zen and the art of Internet" (1992). Graramp played fast with a rule himself by using a rather provocative tone, but I think he is correct in pointing out that some people have been rather lax or thoughtless in this list. Top-posting and full quotes definitely make my teeth itch. ;-) -Ralph